Blood Calls to Blood: From Dracula’s Dungeon to Hopping Corpses and Flying Heads

“The dead travel fast.” - Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, referenced in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

There are places in this world where history screams. I descended into the labyrinthine dungeon beneath Buda Castle in Budapest on a November evening, where Vlad III of Wallachia spent twelve years entombed in living darkness. The cell itself defied expectations. It is barely six feet square, walls slick with moisture from the Danube above, perpetually dark. Standing there, I understood viscerally what four thousand three hundred and eighty days in a suffocating void does to the human soul.